Through the Portal

Saturday we played some Pathfinder. The group talked to an expert, then went back to the dungeon and through the portal to close it.

After teleporting out of the kobold lair, the fort was still where they'd left it 20 minutes before. Before going to bed, however, they were visited by an Inquisitor -- the same one who'd been watching for shapeshifters when they first entered -- who wanted to know all about what they'd found. They didn't trust him enough to give him all the details, but he was willing to describe how to close the common types of portals that had been popping up lately. He was hoping it was a 'type ii' portal which could be closed by destroying eight obelisks hidden nearby on the ethereal plane. It wasn't clear which side of the portal they'd be on of course.

As the Inquisitor turned to leave, he saw something invisible just outside the door, and there was a brief chase that ended with the capture of a kobold spy. Liliana charmed him for interrogation, and he described his clan's remaining forces, and that they were from the far side of the portal -- which he, at least, wanted closed because negative energy from this plane was flooding his home plane and causing a disaster. That wasn't necessarily official policy though. He also revealed that there was cooperation but not a formal alliance with the kobolds of their world.

Talon wanted to head back immediately to close the portal before the kobolds could reinforce it, but was overruled by the mages who were out of spells. They decided to get a night's rest and head out in the morning. Before teleporting back into the dungeon, they sent Max -- a very fast flier -- on a shopping trip to Rally to pick up some Plane Shift scrolls so that they could get back after closing the portal, assuming they had to close it from the far side. Which seemed like a good bet.

Liliana used clairvoyance to spy on the portal room, and spotted nothing in particular in the main area with the seating -- although the portal-closing mechanism had been repaired overnight -- but some kobolds spying through arrow-slits backstage. So they all dimension-doored into the main area, with the plan being for Talon to climb up the curtain and trigger the mechanism manually instead of going and finding the normal lever to use.

They were immediately attacked by a pair of clay golems hiding under the seats. By luck (and some strategically place invisibility spells) they ended up pounding on the group's tanks -- Hef, Hobbes,and Hadriel. But when Hadriel discovered that he couldn't heal the wounds they were inflicting... well, it didn't look good. The golems were hard to damage, especially for the mages, and did a LOT of damage with their fists.

The next part of the trap was for the portal to open behind them, triggered by the kobolds. The party 'fell for it' and rushed through, only to see it closed behind them, leaving them stranded in a dark, dead forest full of Shadows -- shadow tenebrous worms, shadow kobolds, and shadow gloomwings, which (luckily for the party) failed to confuse anyone with their glowing butterfly wings.

Sam was blinking, and during his jaunts onto the ethereal plane managed to spot the obelisks they were expecting, lining the perimeter of the clearing. Unfortunately... none of them had brought any ghost touch weapons, or any way to affect ethereal things, except for Sam himself with his Blink spell. Ane he was going to run out of fireballs a LONG time before the obelisks ran out of hit points.

But Hadriel and Liliana were able to scare the shadows away with Daylight before anyone was too badly hurt or strength-drained, and then Calvin dismissed Hobbes and summoned a Xill instead -- it was one of the standard summoned monsters, and it could go ethereal. It even *barely* did enough damage to slowly break the obelisks, if boosted with a Bull's Strength spell. Now all they had to do was wait five minutes for it to finish, holding off the undead the whole while.

Luckily, most of the undead hated light. They were assaulted by a pack of Mohrgs, but they'd prepared for undead and the Mohrgs were halted and then coup-de-graced by Hef. Undead may be immune to death from massive damage, but not if the massive damage in question is greater than their maximum hit points!

Just as they were finshing up, some living guardians responded to the light and arrived at the center of the undead zone. "What are you doing? Who are you?"

Liliana bullshitted them for 30 seconds until the last obelisk was destroyed -- it and the Xill were both on the ethereal plane, and thus invisible -- and then the party plane-shifted out of there.

They ended up in the middle of Goblin territory, hundreds of miles to the northwest of Rally. This wasn't a HUGE problem since they could always teleport back, and some of them had the notion of loading up on unique goblin trade goods first to make a small profit in the process.